Crazy Ex-Girlfriend recently aired its
series finale, which worked for me on a lot of levels – I didn’t love season 4
as much as I did the first three, but ultimately, I thought the resolution
worked for where they’d taken us. At any
rate, I thought it would be a good time for a post that I’ve been thinking
about for a while, which deals with the character of Josh Chan. While Crazy
Ex-Girlfriend definitely deconstructs romantic-comedy tropes, it also
interacts with them in more conventional ways, and shipping was a big thing on
the show. In the question of Team Josh,
Team Greg, and later, Team Nathaniel, it’s hard for me to think about Josh’s
place in the shipper wars without considering his race (romance spoilers from
throughout the series.)
Even
though this show checks numerous “yes!” boxes for me (smart, musical,
whimsical, feminist, respectful LGBT representation) and, by all rights, it
should have been on my watch list long before it did, Josh is in fact what
first brought me to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I’d heard the show praised in several circles
for having an “Asian male romantic lead,” and sadly, we’re still at the point
where that is a big deal. 1) There are lamentably-few Asians on TV at
all. 2) Even fewer are positioned in
leading roles. 3) There’s a depressing
gap in terms of showing Asian characters as desirable and in romantic/sexual
situations, particularly with Asian men.
In other words, it’s important that the woman in the deconstructionist
musical rom-com is “hopelessly, desperately in love with” this affable
Filipino-American bro, because that’s not a role that would typically be open
to Asian-American actors in Hollywood.
So, when
I finally checked out the show, I was more than a little concerned with the
first couple of episodes. Yes, as soon
as Rebecca arrives in West Covina, she meets a second potential love interest
in the form of Greg, the sarcastic/sensitive (white) bartender. Triangles happen – I don’t like it, but I get
it. What concerned me, though, is that
even though Rebecca only has eyes for Josh, we the viewers can see more
clearly. And what we see is a Josh who’s
at least a bit of a tool, kinda self-impressed, and certainly no prize. Meanwhile, Greg is a charming nice guy
lamenting that he’s fallen for a girl who’s hung up on someone else. All roads seemed to be pointing toward an
ultimate trajectory of Rebecca realizing that Josh isn’t worth all her pining
and that she should look at the great guy-next-door Greg.
It’s a
tried-and-true romcom technique, dangling the perfect-on-the-surface wrong guy/woman before the
protagonist opens their ways to the one who was under their nose all
along. But when you start bringing race
into it, it feels like a bait-and-switch to have the “wrong guy” be Asian-American
and the “right guy” white. Even though
it obviously wouldn’t be about Rebecca rejecting Josh because of his race, the end result would be that the show’s
Ross/Rachel, Sam/Diane, what-have-you would be with the white guy, and the
Asian-American guy would only be a pitstop on the heroine’s way to love.
Fortunately,
things don’t stay that cut-and-dried. We
start seeing signs of Josh’s sweetness and warmth by episode 3, and Greg isn’t
as unambiguously-great as he first appears (not that Josh is a dear and Greg is
a mess, of course – both guys have
qualities and faults, which is ultimately why I like them.) However, Rebecca’s interactions with Josh in
the first two seasons pretty consistently hit “delusional” beats, while her
interactions with Greg are more complex and suggest a deeper connection, albeit
with a lot of damage and dysfunction.
Even though I personally felt as season 1 progressed that, with
growth/healing on all sides, Rebecca could
be a good fit with either guy, the message the show seemed to be sending was
“Forget this Josh business, but this thing with Greg is worth fighting for,
even though it’ll be hard.
This
becomes more complicated when we consider Josh’s position on the show, as the
object of Rebecca’s obsessive love that’s in fact a byproduct of her mental
health issues. I get that Rebecca’s
obsession with Josh is deeply unhealthy, and I can understand the show taking
the tack that she’s not “supposed” to be with him. But here’s my thing: if the show knows that that’s Josh’s
function, then it shouldn’t have accepted the praise from different outlets
about Josh as an (again, incredibly rare) Asian male romantic lead. To be fair, I never saw the show tooting its
own horn on this subject. But when it
came up, I never heard anyone say, “Well, we want to be clear, Rebecca’s whole
thing with Josh, etc., etc., but we do
agree it’s so important to have Asian men shown to be desirable…” and so
forth. They just rather humbly took the
win and talked about depicting West Covina as realistically diverse, when all
the while, it was never going to be Josh.
These
uneasy feelings about the show’s handling of Josh increase for me with season
2. Follow the timeframe with me: Greg leaves the show at the start of episode
4. Rebecca and Josh get together at the
end of episode 8. The very next episode
introduces another straight white guy (Nathaniel) who immediately starts
comparing himself favorably to Josh. And
again, Nathaniel isn’t perfect – far from it.
But as with Greg, Nathaniel’s emotional damage is portrayed as complex,
and we quickly see that he’s more successful, more intellectually stimulating,
and challenges Rebecca more than Josh. A
mere two episodes later, Rebecca is kissing Nathaniel in an elevator.
After the
rather impressive flameout of Rebecca and Josh’s relationship at the end of
season 2, season 3 sees Rebecca eventually exploring her attraction to
Nathaniel while Josh becomes more and more of a supporting character, usually
the butt of a joke. I wouldn’t say
Rebecca’s thing with Nathaniel is all that similar to her thing with Greg, but
both are depicted as extremely messy but real,
whereas, when Rebecca and Josh are together, it’s always depicted as
delusional. And to repeat, I understand
it if that’s what the show is going for, but why does it have to be messy/real
relationships with the two white guys and delusional relationship with the one
Asian-American guy? How did the show not
see how that looked?
On the
plus side, season 4 does a little course-correcting on Josh. While he’s still his sunny, slightly-dim
self, he starts exploring himself a little more, getting into therapy, and he
and Rebecca become friends again and even move in together (as roommates.) It’s a balm to me to see him treated more
like a character than a cheap joke, but I braced myself when the “love
quadrangle” kicked in during the second half of the season with the return of
Greg (albeit played by a different actor, a fact lampshaded by the show.) The storylines become a very literal “which
one will she choose?” Bachelor-esque
dynamic between Rebecca and the three guys, and while Josh is treated as
equally likely as the other two on paper, that almost made it worse for me,
because I just didn’t see any way Rebecca would be “choosing” him, and it
seemed unsporting to act like he was an equal contender for added “suspense”
when most of the work the show had done over the last four seasons was pointing
much more clearly at Greg or Nathaniel.
And even though, in the end, Rebecca decides to focus on herself and her
own journey rather than “pick a guy,” it didn’t escape my notice that the
one-year time-jump pairs up Josh with a nameless girlfriend while Rebecca,
Greg, and Nathaniel are all conveniently still single, leaving viewers free to
imagine Rebecca eventually getting back together with the white guy of their
preference.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend will always get credit
for even creating a character like Josh Chan in the first place (paving the way
for The Good Place’s Jason
Mendoza?) I love that he’s an Asian bro,
that he’s not book-smart, and that he’s definitely depicted as being hot – way
to break stereotypes with the lyrics of one song featuring a bet that, of the
three guys, Josh has “the biggest schlong.”
But when it comes to how it depicts him as a potential love interest in
comparison to the other two (white) potential love interests, I don’t think the
show gave much (or any?) consideration to the optics of how they were framing
TV’s second Asian male rom-com lead ever (after John Cho in Selfie,) and to me, that’s disappointing.
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